Quit Smoking

A free class is starting up during the last week of August for those smokers who are interested in quitting the habit. The Quit Smoking Now program sponsored by the Florida Department of Health in Lake County begins on Tuesday, Aug. 26 and runs through Sept. 30. Classes are held from 5:30-6:30 p.m. at the Community Health Center, 225 N. First St. in Leesburg. The weekly classes run for six weeks and participants must attend all six classes. The program, which DoH-Lake County is doing in collaboration with the Central Florida Area Health Education Center, is free to attend and includes: No charge for materials.

A free class is starting up during the last week of August for those smokers who are interested in quitting the habit. The Quit Smoking Now program sponsored by the Florida Department of Health in Lake County begins on Tuesday, Aug. 26 and runs through Sept. 30. Classes are held from 5:30-6:30 p.m. at the Community Health Center, 225 N. First St. in Leesburg. The weekly classes run for six weeks and participants must attend all six classes. The program, which DoH-Lake County is doing in collaboration with the Central Florida Area Health Education Center, is free to attend and includes: No charge for materials.

No matter how long or how heavily a woman smokes, her increased risk of having a stroke disappears almost completely within two to four years after quitting, the largest study of its kind has found.A woman who currently smokes is 2 1/2 times more likely to have a stroke than a woman who has never smoked, the study of 117,006 middle-aged white women found. But the excess risk largely disappeared within two to four years of quitting.A researcher who has conducted similar studies called the results terrific news for women smokers.

Anyone in Clermont who smokes - and hates the habit - will have an opportunity to find the most successful ways of quitting later this month, when the Florida Department of Health in Lake County begins offering free smoking cessation classes. Sponsored in collaboration with the Central Florida Area Health Education Center, the free Quit Smoking Now Program offers a series of weekly classes that will start on Monday, Aug. 18 and continue through Monday, Sept. 22. Participants, DoH-Lake County noted, must attend all six classes.

Nobody pesters my wife and me to quit smoking. If they did, what could they say?Would they claim that smoking will kill us? We're nearly 70 years old, in very good health, play golf several times a week and think life is grand.Would they say that our smoke bothers them? We never light up in non-smokers' homes or in their cars, and we never smoke in restaurants or other public places.Would they claim that it's costly for the government to pay our hospital bills? We have not been in a hospital in 30 years.

A FIVE-DAY ''quit smoking clinic'' will be held Feb. 24-28 at the Brevard County Public Health Unit office, 611 Singleton Ave., Titusville. Registration, which includes a $5 fee for educational materials, will begin at 7 p.m. Feb. 24. The sessions will begin at 7:30 p.m. each night. The program consists of speakers, films and strategies to quit smoking. For more information, call 268-3730.

A Massachusetts woman who smoked a pack of cigarettes a day for 29 years has been awarded workers' compensation disability after an administrative judge ruled that secondary smoke accelerated her breathing problems. Phyllis Bena, 62, who quit smoking in 1980 after 29 years, was awarded $381.04 a week for 260 weeks for breathing difficulties that worsened between 1980 and 1988 as she worked in a state agency's offices where smoking was allowed.

Children continue to suffer physical and mental growth deficiencies at the age of 3 if their mothers smoked while pregnant, a study in the International Journal of Epidemiology reports. A second study in the same journal shows that mothers who stop smoking during pregnancy will help their children's physical and mental growth. Both studies were done by a team of researchers at the University of Maryland School of Medicine and the Maryland Medical Research Institute in Baltimore. The studies looked at 3-year-old children whose mothers smoked cigarettes or quit smoking during pregnancy.

AND FOR those of you who've now decided to quit smoking, here's some advice to holding off weight gain. Sip ice water. The technique works, according to Eileen DiFrisco, R.N., coordinator for outpatient education at New York University Medical Center's Cooperative Care unit. Because ice water is an appetite suppressant, she explained, sipping it replaces the act of smoking with a positive oral activity. The average person gains about five pounds in the course of quitting because ex-smokers eat more and spend less energy at rest than smokers.

CAN YOUR mood have lasting effects on your health? Well, Johns Hopkins University researchers report in the American Journal of Epidemiology that depressed people who smoke run a much higher risk of cancer than non-depressed smokers. We all know there's already enough evidence to convince everybody, including depressed people, that they should quit smoking. The important thing about this study, one researcher says, is ''to establish whether or not the mind can affect the body in ways that can lead to an increased risk of things like cancer.

The National Training Center in Clermont will be hosting Quit Smoking Now classes on Mondays, starting on June 2. The five week class will be held from 6:30-8 p.m. at the center at 1935 Don Wickham Drive in Clermont, across from South Lake Hospital. This is a program being sponsored by the Florida Department of Health Office in Lake County, in collaboration with the Central Florida Area Health Education Center. These free classes are being held at three locations in Lake County.

Florida voters have given lifelong smokers such as Jack Ferrara new reason to breathe easy. After a number of tries with nicotine patches, acupuncture and hypnosis failed him, the Hollywood retiree finally snuffed out his 58-year cigarette habit - thanks to a state-run program gaining notice for making big strides in stamping out nicotine addiction. Since 2007, after a voter mandate assured robust funding for a statewide cessation effort, Tobacco Free Florida has helped 72,000 Floridians quit, saving $4.2 billion in personal health-care costs and changing the Sunshine State's attitude toward smoking, state health officials say. Orange and Lake counties both have among the state's lowest adult-smoking percentages.

It makes sense: Smokers who think more about the future are more likely to quit, a study suggests. Research has long shown that smokers are less likely than nonsmokers to make long-term plans. Now a study from the journal Addiction published Wednesday looks at the issue from another perspective. Heather Brown and Jean Adams of Newcastle University in Britain looked at eight years of data from a database called the Household Income and Labor Dynamics of Australia . More than 7,000 households in Australia are surveyed annually about work, family and well-being.

OK, so maybe today isn't the perfect day to quit smoking . For years, the experts were preaching that any day was a good day to quit, and they had annual campaigns encouraging people to give up the habit. The campaigns raised awareness, and they led many smokers away from tobacco. Now, though, the experts are beginning to recognize that to be successful in quitting, many smokers need to do some planning. Most of us can't just toss away that pack of cigarettes, never to light up again.

LOS ANGELES - Smoking raises the risk of diabetes, but new research indicates that Smokers who plan to quit should be very careful not to start eating more and thus gain weight, said epidemiologist Hsin-Chien "Jessica" Yeh of Johns Hopkins University, the lead author of the study. But the most important message, she said, is "don't begin to smoke in the first place." Yeh and her colleagues studied 10,892 middle-age adults who were enrolled in a study to determine their risk of atherosclerosis, or hardening of the arteries.

Happy New Year! Strange how 2009 flew by: Didn't I just get married, Pleasure Island just close down, and the new Will's Pub open up? Funny to think that all those events happened in 2008, but 2009 did have its moments for sure. Most of them involved a lot of wallet watching, thanks to our sad economy. I made sure to let you guys know about as many deals around town as possible. Hey, if you stop going and the bars and clubs in this town close shop, I'm out of a job myself. One of the biggest closings of the year didn't have so much to do with the economy but a missed opportunity at targeting its market.

RESOLUTION:A promise to change something, most often made at the start of a new year.RESOLVE:What you must have to make a resolution stick, most often failing about a week into the new year.Its that time again. Its the beginning of a new year, and that means parties, fresh starts and the ever-popular New Years resolutions.For many teen-agers, school is the focus of their resolutions, when they vow to do everything from making better grades to not sleeping in class.Dawn Lippman is a sophomore at Lake Mary High.

It was a day of good intentions at the Lake County American Cancer Society's Smoke Out booth Thursday as volunteers handed out pamphlets, headless matches, and survival kits to help smokers quit the habit.The booth at Lake Square Mall was part of a national effort to get smokers to quit for the day.''We had one gentleman turn in his pack of cigarettes,'' said Joni Hudson, one of the volunteers. ''And a couple of people have put out their cigarettes as they passed by.''Most of the people who stopped by the booth, however, were non-smokers interested in getting a friend or spouse to stop smoking.